Review: Intel’s “Raptor Canyon” NUC is a compact gaming PC without the stress - Ars Technica

It replaces the "Dragon Canyon" NUC design and improves upon it by making room for longer triple-slot GPUs—up to 12 inches (or just over 300 mm) long.

Raptor Canyon might appeal to people who want a powerful gaming desktop without putting in the legwork, research, and trial and error that comes with building a computer inside a tiny case.

But the ability to fit more powerful GPUs means it will make a little more sense than the middle-of-the-road Dragon Canyon box did.

The Raptor Canyon NUC Extreme box is just shy of twice the size of the old NUC Extreme—it looks like two old Dragon Canyon boxes stacked on top of each other.

That Compute Element plugs into the top of a separate proprietary board, which also has a PCIe 5.0 slot on the bottom for connecting the dedicated GPU (the old NUC Extreme also used a go-between board like this, but with the GPU slot next to the Compute Element slot instead of on the opposite side of the board).

One last upgrade over the old Dragon Canyon NUC design (for people who want even more storage than the M.2 slots can provide): An empty drive tray on the computer's left side can fit a pair of 2.5-inch SATA drives or a single 3.5-inch SATA drive.

There are no LEDs on Raptor Canyon other than the white one around the power button, and the Compute Element doesn't appear to include standard 3- or 4-pin RGB headers for people who want to switch the plain 120 mm fans on the side for RGB versions.